Septinsular Republic

A 54-year-old Greek man faced a prosecutor on Monday charged with the fatal beating of a 40-year-old foreign national on the Ionian island of Ithaki on Saturday.

The alleged perpetrator's 42-year-old wife, who was present at the time of the beating, notified police after finding the 40-year-old dead in a hotel room on Sunday.

The property market expects building permits to soar in the coming months.

The Culture Ministry on Tuesday announced the findings of the latest excavations at the wreck of the Mentor, a brig that belonged to Britain's Lord Elgin and went down off the island of Kythira, south of the Peloponnese, in 1802, carrying at least 17 crates of antiquities from the Acropolis and elsewhere.

Two moderate tremors struck the Ionian island of Zakynthos on Saturday, rattling residents but causing no injuries or major damage.

The first quake, measuring 4.4 on the Richter scale, struck off the island's southern coast shortly before 2 a.m.

The second, a 4.2-level temblor, came eight hours later off the island's western coast, just before 10 a.m.

A spate of bad weather at the end of last week struck parts of the country particularly hard, with residents of Cephalonia struggling over the weekend to deal with widespread damage wreaked by torrential rain that left parts of the Ionian island covered in mud.

Thunderstorms and heavy rain were reported in parts of western Greece since early Friday, including the Ionian islands.

The weather front, according to the Meteo weather service of the Athens National Observatory, is going to move slowly eastward and affect almost all of Greece, with the exception of the island of Crete.

Following its publication in Greek last year, "The Last Monk of the Strofades: Memories from an Unknown Greek Island" is now available in English from Abbeville Press.

Greek authorities say 40 migrants rescued by a passing merchant ship from a crippled sailboat off western Greece have safely arrived in port.

In a statement, the coast guard said the 34 men, two women and four children disembarked Wednesday in Kalamata, southern Greece.

About 50,000 tourists are stranded in Greece and mainly on island resorts after British travel firm Thomas Cook collapsed, the tourism minister said on Monday as extra flights were booked to ease their return home.

About 50,000 tourists are stranded in Greece, mainly on islands, as a result of British travel firm Thomas Cook's collapse, a Greek tourism ministry official told Reuters on Monday.

The tourists, mainly British, were vacationing in the islands of Zakynthos, Kos, Corfu, Skiathos and Crete, the official said.